Picks of the Week: May 6 - 12, 2012

Website of the Week -- Common Knowledge
Common Knowledge, a consulting agency founded in 2002 and based in San Francisco provides comprehensive consulting services for online fundraising, advocacy, marketing and communications to nonprofit organizations that need to leverage the Internet more effectively to further their mission. The site includes an extensive list of resources on use of technology by nonprofits. Go to: http://www.commonknow.com/html/index.php.

Publication of the Week -- Performance Measurement: Getting Results by Harry Hatry, 2nd edition
From the publisher: Long before "reinventing government" came into vogue, the Urban Institute pioneered methods for government and human services agencies to measure the performance of their programs. This book synthesizes more than two decades of Harry Hatry's pioneering work on performance measurement into a comprehensive guide. The author explains every component of the process, from identifying the program's mission, objectives, customers, and trackable outcomes to finding the best indicators for each outcome, the sources of data, and how to collect them. He covers the selection of indicator breakouts and benchmarks for comparisons to actual values and suggests a number of uses for performance information. Joseph Wholey contributes a chapter on maintaining the quality of the performance measurement process. Click to preview this book on Amazon.com.

Trend of the Week – Nonprofit Social Networking Trends
NTEN, Common Knowledge and Blackbaud have released the fourth annual 2012 Nonprofit Social Networking Benchmark Report. The report provides insights for nonprofits, foundations, media and businesses serving the nonprofit sector about the most important behavior and trends surrounding social networking as part of nonprofits’ marketing, communications, fundraising, program and IT work. Key trends include:
• Commercial social network use by respondents has passed well into mainstream adoption leaving a small percentage of late mainstream and laggards to join in.
• Facebook popularity among respondents is at saturation levels, while average community size continues to grow.
• Twitter adoption still growing along with average follower base size.
• LinkedIn popularity is relatively low (compared to Facebook and Twitter) but 2011 saw a sizeable jump in adoption of this channel.
• Many mature (2+ years old) commercial social networking communities continue to grow, while an increasingly smaller number of respondents are just getting started.

To download a copy of the report, go to: http://nonprofitsocialnetworksurvey.com.

Resource of the Week – Building Capacity to Measure and Manage Performance
Over the last decade, the social sector has witnessed a dramatic shift towards a focus on measureable results, with nonprofits feeling immense pressure to demonstrate their impact. Yet many nonprofits appear to be woefully under-investing in measurement, particularly in their own internal capacity to measure and manage performance in an effort to improve their organizations. Based on interviews with nonprofit leaders and more than a decade of consulting and executive search work, this article from Bridgespan shares five key lessons that create the underpinnings for how organizations can approach building their capacities to measure and manage performance to improve impact. To download the article, go to: http://www.bridgespan.org.

Tech Tip of the Week -- Keep a file on the Office 2007/2010 Recent Documents List
An excellent new feature in Office 2007/2010 which works in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access, is the ability to keep or “pin” a file in the Recent Documents list, here’s how:
• In 2007 click the Microsoft Office button or in 2010 click the File Tab and then click Recent
• Click the pin icon beside the document you want to keep on the list
• The pin button icon changes to a push pin viewed from the top